In a recent Forbes Technology Council article, Karan Jain explores why fast-tracking innovation inside financial institutions still takes too long – even with agile teams. The core insight: the biggest barriers aren’t governance alone; they’re slow, reset-driven learning cycles and experimentation treated as one-off projects instead of institutional capability.
We agree – and the good news is that 2026 brings powerful infrastructure to fix this. Digital sandboxes and Vendor Delivery Infrastructure are emerging as execution layers, enabling banks and fintech players to test, validate, and scale ideas faster, safer, and with far less internal friction.
This post builds on Karan’s analysis by highlighting practical ways these technologies turn slow-moving innovation into a repeatable, competitive advantage.
Why Traditional Innovation in Banking Still Drags - and How Digital Sandboxes Help
Many PoCs stall after initial enthusiasm, delayed by data access approvals, InfoSec reviews, time required to build the test environment, and unclear success criteria.
A digital sandbox addresses this head-on. It provides a controlled, virtual environment – often powered by synthetic data – where teams can:
- Test new products, AI models, or fintech integrations without risking live systems or real customer data.
- Simulate real-world scenarios (payments, lending, fraud detection) with compliance guardrails.
- Iterate rapidly, gather insights, and refine before any production commitment.
Regulators such as the UK FCA have operationalised digital sandbox models to enable safe, supervised experimentation through their Digital Sandbox and Supercharged Sandbox and private platforms are making these environments widely available. In 2026, institutions using digital sandboxes shrink “time to insight” dramatically – turning weeks or months of setup into days of meaningful experimentation.
This aligns perfectly with Karan’s call for efficient learning loops: sandboxes make failure cheap, fast, and instructive, embedding continuous experimentation into daily operations.
Vendor Delivery Infrastructure: The Execution Layer for Faster Fintech Adoption
Even great ideas need smooth delivery. Many banks face vendor chaos – lengthy evaluations, custom integrations, compliance reviews, and scaling risks slow everything down.
Vendor delivery infrastructure replaces fragmented, one-off vendor onboarding with a governed, shared substrate for vendor discovery, comparison, and validation. It acts as a standardised platform that lets financial institutions:
- Discover and compare third-party fintech solutions side-by-side.
- Run secure, production-like proofs of concept using synthetic data.
- Validate compliance, performance, and fit without heavy engineering lift.
- Deploy winning vendors repeatably and at speed across the organization.
Platforms like NayaOne offering this infrastructure reduce vendor onboarding from 12+ months to weeks, while maintaining strict controls. This directly tackles Karan’s point about innovation economics: when delivery becomes repeatable and low-risk, institutions can run more bets in parallel – accelerating overall learning velocity.
Practical Steps to Leverage These Tools in 2026
To move beyond bottlenecks and embed faster innovation:
- Adopt a digital sandbox early – Start with regulatory or commercial sandboxes for AI agents, tokenisation pilots, or open banking experiments. Use them to capture structured learnings (e.g., via shared dashboards or retrospectives).
- Build or partner for vendor delivery infrastructure – Allocate budget to platforms that handle vendor evaluation and deployment. This creates a “portfolio of bets” model, where small experiments scale quickly if they succeed.
- Measure learning velocity – Track metrics like time from idea to validated insight, experiments per quarter, and invalidation rate (killing bad ideas fast saves resources).
- Integrate cross-functional teams – Bring compliance, risk, and business into the sandbox from day one – not as approvers, but as collaborators.
- Leverage 2026 accelerators – Combine sandboxes with AI-driven tools, modular APIs, and industry consortia to compound speed.
The 2026 Competitive Edge
The institutions winning in 2026 won’t have the most ideas – they’ll have the fastest, most efficient way to learn from them. Digital sandboxes reduce risk and accelerate testing; vendor delivery infrastructure streamlines adoption and scaling. Together, they turn the structural and cultural issues Karan describes into solvable engineering problems.
By prioritising these tools, financial institutions can close the gap between emerging tech (agentic AI, digital assets, etc.) and real business impact – faster than competitors stuck in legacy processes.
This post expands on Karan Jain’s Forbes article: Why Fast-Tracking Innovation Inside Financial Institutions Still Takes Too Long.
What roadblocks are slowing innovation at your institution – and how are you exploring digital sandboxes or vendor delivery infrastructure?
